Are you looking for a way, any way, to drive new customers to your website? Organic search and paid advertising work to a degree, but they don’t provide the same motivation that an offer does. Offers are a proven method to getting targeted buyers to visit your website. They do this by providing something of value - solutions to help them solve a problem.
Offers can take the form of:
- Whitepapers
- eBooks
- Coupons
- Webinars
- Free trials
- and more…
What you choose to offer will depend upon whom you are targeting, what their problem is, and where they are in the purchasing process. Your offer has to help them – be something they want – something they really need. This need will be the reason they act now, rather than procrastinate and forget about it. Providing something of value is key to establishing credibility and keeping them coming back for more.
“Our jobs as marketers are to understand how the customer wants to buy and help them do so.” – Bryan Eisenberg
Here are the 7 Steps to Planning An Offer:
1. Set your business goals
What is the main purpose of creating your offer? To attract more visitors to your website? Convert more contacts into leads? Set your goals to help you measure the effectiveness of your efforts.
2. Identify your customer and their needs
“Everyone is not your customer.” – Seth Godin
Creating an offer for the world at large is like cooking spaghetti and throwing it against the wall hoping it sticks. Rather than capture the contact information from a few people that may or may not become long-term customers, consider focusing your efforts only to those whom are your most desirable customers. List the details about these customers (demographics, job details, pain points). Use this information to develop your messaging.
3. Create your offer
Now that you know who your customer is, where they are in the purchasing process, and have identified their biggest challenge, create an offer that is designed to help them resolve their problem. For top of the funnel offers – goal is to generate awareness, create an offer that is educational, such as a webinar or ebook. Offers that are targeted towards the consideration stage, provide offers that compare products or even offer a free trial.
4. Build your landing pages
Build a landing page (website page) that includes a lead-capture form. The purpose of the form is to collect information about your interested visitors to help you qualify them as a lead, and build your email contact list for future marketing campaigns. Once your new lead fills out the form (submit), they will then land on what is known as the Thank you page. The purpose of this page is to provide the offer download, and thank your new lead for their interest.
5. Write a blog
Leverage the content in your offer to write a blog. You already have created the content for the offer, now with a little re-work, you can turn it into a blog. Use your blog as one of your promotional avenues to engage new customers.
6. Distribute your offer
Knowing your customer will help you understand what social media channels they spend their time on, which will help you to know where to reach them to promote your new offer.
7. Measure your results against your goals.
Doing this for every offer will help you to see the types of offers and which promotional channels are the most successful in reaching your goals.
Building offers is just one of the many ways to attract new visitors to your website. You get one shot, so make sure to provide something of real value, help them to solve their problems. Once you do that, they will come back for more.